“... generate an infinite number of testable propositions about reality: so the successful theory may nevertheless contain a huge quantity of undiscovered falsehoods, larger even than a theory that has hitherto failed most of our tests. It is thus impossible to see how a theory’s ability to stir vive our best efforts at refutation can establish that it ...”

“... Spanish Crown. Thus Ayacucho can be considered the birthplace of the modern Peruvian state, and may yet prove to be its burial site. The revolution’s ferocity has given the Corner of the Dead a new and chilling resonance. Journalists, at first mystified by the theatricality and macabre ritual of Sendero’s violence, groped for clichés, something to help ...”

“... Murry in shop-window poses with faces to match. At the time of the Cornish venture what Lawrence may have needed from Katherine was an audience for his fights with Frieda, which were growing increasingly exhibitionist. Katherine heard all the obscene abuse, saw all the punching, chasing and yelling, and no doubt had to dodge the saucepans and smoothing-irons ...”

“... actually pseudonyms for Burt himself. Gillie went on explicitly to suggest that Burt’s studies may have been the result of deliberate fraud rather than of an old man’s unintentional carelessness – a thought that had previously crossed a few minds but had not yet been expressed in print. Then Hearnshaw’s biography reported that Burt’s private papers ...”

“... In the case of a living artist, the wish, being capable of fulfilment, has a potency which may distract as much as concentrate the mind and the feelings; and with an artist like Dylan, who has a cult following, the element of wish-fulfilment can have some disturbing effects, as Paul Williams revealed in a candid self-analysis: ‘There’s a terrible ...”

“... two documents which destroyed his case. (If, as Mr Horne thinks, they had come into my hands in May 1963, they would also have destroyed the Labour Party’s whole stand on the Profumo affair.) The first document was not sensational. It was a memorandum from Wigg to Wilson – a boring blow-by-blow account of Wigg’s assiduous sniffing around: he fancied ...”

“... specialised activity within the cultural division of labour, and the related emergence of what may be called the ‘aesthetic attitude’. By this I do not mean simply the notion of art for art’s sake or its later incarnation as Fin-de-Siècle aestheticism. I mean rather a broader late 18th and 19th-century stress on the primacy of making, arising not ...”

“... explore such issues. (A third will be about possible distributions of income and wealth.) And it may be that he has a good answer in hand. But in Williams’s way of putting it, and Hampshire would perhaps agree, there are important differences between reasons that, reasons for and reasons from: a reason that we should do something is a reason for us, but ...”

“... of Ignazio Florio, a member of one of the few prospering families on the island, and he may have helped her through lean times. She was an inestimable influence on her son, as David Gilmour makes plain. Giuseppe was born the year her first child, Stefania, died; when Giuseppe joined the infantry in the First World War, she wrote with extravagant ...”

“... concreteness of such a passage is matched by its pervasive nausea. The poem as a whole may seem vague and histrionic and shot to pieces, but individual words and lines are of such force and brilliance that they make the efforts of other translators appear puny. The first three lines are unsurpassable, and the vigour of what follows argues the case ...”

“... the book, that helps to bring the argument into sharp focus: ‘You have granted that woman may be hung, therefore you must grant that woman may vote.’ An occasional touch of humour lightens the darkness without trivialising: one female prisoner, whose shotgun went off accidentally, told the author, ‘When I get ...”

“... was decisive, absolutely decisive, which it still is, to my mind, despite all the criticisms we may have of the Soviet Union.’ A decade ago, such arguments were not uncommon within the CP. Today, that has all gone. Death, Gorbachev and the irreversible fracturing of the Communist Party under the pressure of the Marxism Today generation have accomplished a ...”

“... was Africa, I was in Africa.’ The important idea here is that the sins of colonial forebears may be visited on hapless sons; that the past strips the European bare of any innocence in Africa. But again this politics is coarse – a natural history of empire – and can only crystallise around a sense of danger. ‘They knew that I was white, and the only ...”

“... the desired changes in the shortest possible time.’ Here, at last, the draft’s authors may have permitted themselves to see into the life of things. For what has underlain the perestroika process until its present, fragmented stage is precisely that feeling – one of the most insidious and widespread legacies of Stalinism – that an effort of ...”

“... at the door of Sasha’s horrible hotel room, is certainly memorable. The strange comfort of it may be the drug the Rhys addict goes for, for the commis voyageur is everything to be fled from which becomes our fate in the end. Good Morning, Midnight finally appeared on the eve of the Second World War, and vanished without trace. No one at that time was ...”